SAGE SOLITAIRE

YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE A SAGE TO ENJOY THIS SMART CARD GAME.

Indie game designer Zach Gage has built-up a respected reputation thanks to his steady stream of clever mobile titles (including the excellent SpellTower, Ridiculous Fishing and Halcyon) and his unwillingness to be pinned down to just one genre. His latest creation is this single-player card game that combines solitaire with poker. As in regular solitaire, the objective is to get rid of all your cards, but you do so by creating poker-like hands — match a trio of sixes and you can discard all three cards, for example — with the ultimate objective just being to beat your previous high score. ere’s a button up the top that lets you quickly see what kinds of matches you can make (that includes two-, three- and four-of-a-kind, a full house and most kinds of straights and ushes) and games typically only take a few minutes. is one’s very well presented both in terms of graphical polish and simplicity of play — and constantly creating matches does successfully tickle the right reward centres in your brain to keep you coming back. It doesn’t hurt that it’s free either, and you can put up with ads interspersed between games, or pay $3.79 to get rid of them and unlock a couple of new game modes. A solidly enjoyable little time waster. [